Five students from New England won medals in the 9th annual China Girls Mathematical Olympiad, at which the US team placed second, behind China. The girls on the U.S. teams wrote an online travelogue at www.msri.org/specials/gmo/2010. The Mathematical Association of America also had an item about it (read it here), in which the coach said the team “did well on combinatorics problems and number theory problems” but had issues with geometry and also algebra, which he described as “our real weak subject in general” - although I imagine they don’t stumble of what most of us think of as algebra from high school days.

Gold medals were awarded (among others) to Jae Eui Shin, a senior at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts; Elizabeth Synge from Lexington, MA, a senior at Boston University Academy; and Shijie Joy Zheng from Bellevue, Washington, a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. A bronze medal was awarded to Adisa Kruayatidee from Stevenson Ranch, CA, who is a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy; and an honorable mention acknowledged Andi Wang from Stoneham, Mass. who will attend MIT this fall.

48 teams of girls from ten countries throughout the world competed at the international competition held in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Provence, China.

The eight US team members were chosen from the top ranks of the female finalists in the 2010 USA Mathematical Olympiad. The teams’ coach was Zuming Feng, a math teacher on the faculty of Phillips Exeter Academy, leader of the USA International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) team, and director of the Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program (MOSP) since 2003.